Review: The Strange Attractor

The Strange Attractor by Desmond Cory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Strange Attractor seems to be a Numbers episode put into a Sherlock Holmes book.

The book focuses on the main character John Dobie. Dobie is a Mathematics professor and as such the book is presented from that view point. The logical and structured thought process of Dobie makes for a unique voice. This very voice provides a humorous context to the entire story that is present even while investigating multiple murders.

I found the setting of the early technological era to be quite interesting combined with a main character who seems to be more of an applied mathematician making use of emerging computer technology. This played an important part in the story. However, Dobie’s ability to make logical deductions pulled me into the whole mystery of the story.

I was not a huge fan of how the police were portrayed. They were all incompetent cookie cutter characters until the very last part of the book. I think it would have made for a better story if they were not so over the top incompetent. I was also not a huge fan of the narrator randomly calling the killer Agatha Cristy to hide the identity. It didn’t fit, since any notion of the author was just introduced a scene earlier with completely different characters. That and it was fairly obvious who was behind it all by that point anyway.

There is one other aspect of the story that was distracting, that may just be a formatting issue in the Kindle book. There were no breaks in between scenes. The narration would just jump and I would have to realize that there were new characters in new scenes. Simple line breaks would have improved the flow immensely.

Overall I really enjoyed the book. It was fairly light reading, but still a book you will think about after you finish reading it.

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